Looking at the gun, passionately admiring it, he thought how they might have to stay in that room for years. Why not? He liked the room, it had begun to be his home. They would have to get things, of course. They could buy a fridge and a TV. The men who brought them up the stairs could be told to leave them on the landing. Joyce would do anything he said now, and there wouldn’t be any more snappy back answers from her. He could tell that from one glance at her face. Not threats or privation or uncongenial company or separation from her family had broken her, but the reality of the gun had. That was what it had been made for.

He would have two slaves now, for Marty looked as shaken by what had happened as she did. One to shop and run errands and one to cook and wait on him. He, Nigel, wasn’t broken or even shaken. He was on top of the world and king of it.

‘We need bread and tea bags and coffee,’ he said to Marty, ‘and a can of paraffin for the stove.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Marty. ‘I’m sick.’

‘I’d be bloody sick if I boozed the way you do. While you’re out you can go buy us a big fridge and a colour TV.’

‘Do what? You’re crazy.’

‘Don’t you call me crazy, little brain,’ shouted Nigel. ‘We’ve got to stay here, right? Thanks to her, we’ve got to stay here a long, long time. The three of us can stay here for years, I’ve got it all worked out. Once we’ve got a fridge you won’t have to go out more than once a week. I don’t like it, you going to the same shops over and over, shooting your mouth off to guys in shops, I know you. We’ll all stay in here like I said and keep quiet and watch the TV. So you don’t blue all our bread on fancy stuff, right? We go careful and we can live here two years, I’ve got it all worked out.’

‘No,’ Joyce whimpered. ‘No.’

Nigel rounded on her. ‘Nobody’s asking you, I’m telling you. If I get so much as a squeak out of you, you’re dead. A bomb could go off in this place and they wouldn’t hear. You know that, don’t you? You’ve had the experience.’

On Thursday morning Marty made a big effort and got as far as the corner shop. He bought a large white loaf and some cheese and two cans of beans, but he forgot the tea bags and the coffee. Carrying the paraffin would have been too much for him, he knew that, so he didn’t even bother to take the can. Food didn’t interest him, anyway, he couldn’t keep a thing on his stomach. He had some whisky and retched. When he came back from the lavatory he said to Nigel:

‘My pee’s gone brown.’

‘So what? You’ve only got cystitis. You’ve irritated your bladder with the booze.’

‘I’m dead scared,’ said Marty. ‘You don’t know how bad I feel. Christ, I might die. Look at my face, my cheeks are sort of fallen in. Look at my eyes.’

Nigel didn’t answer him. He sat cobbling for himself a kind of holster made from a plastic jeans belt of Marty’s and a bit of towelling. He sewed it together with Joyce’s brown knitting wool while Joyce watched him. He needn’t have bothered, for Joyce would have died before she touched that gun again. She had given up her knitting, she had given up doing anything. She just sat or cringed on the sofa in a daze. Nigel was happy. All the time he was doing mental arithmetic, working out how much they would be able to spend on food each week, how much on electricity and gas. The summer was coming, he thought, so they wouldn’t need any heat. When the money ran out, he’d make Marty get a job to keep them all.

The next day there was no paraffin left and no tea or butter or milk. The bookcase in the kitchen contained only a spoonful of coffee in the bottom of the jar, half the cheese Marty had bought and most of the bread, two cans of soup and one of beans and three eggs. The warm weather had given place to a chilly white fog, and it was very cold in the room. Nigel put the oven on full and lit all the burners, angry because it would come expensive on the gas bill and upset his calculations. But even he could see Marty was no better, limp as a rag and dozing most of the time. He considered going out himself and leaving Marty with the gun. Joyce wouldn’t try anything, all the fight had gone out of her. She was the way he had always wanted her to be, cowed, submissive, trembling, dissolving into tears whenever he spoke to her. She made beans on toast for their supper without a murmur of protest while he stood over her with the gun, and she gobbled her share up like a starving caged animal which has had a lump of refuse thrown to it. No, it wasn’t the fear of her escaping that kept him from going. It was the idea of having to relinquish even for ten minutes – he could see from the kitchen window the corner shop, open and brightly lit – the precious possession of the gun.

That evening, while he was thinking about what kind and what size of fridge they should buy, whether they could afford a colour television or should settle for black and white, Joyce spoke to him. It was the first time she had really spoken since she fired the gun.

‘Nigel,’ she said in a small sad voice.

He looked at her impatiently. Her hair hung lank and her nails were dirty and she had a spot, an ugly eruption, coming out at the corner of her mouth. Marty lay bundled up, with all the blankets they possessed wrapped round him. What a pair, he thought. A good thing they had him to manage them and tell them what to do.

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘What?’

She put her hands together and bowed her head. ‘You said,’ she whispered, ‘you said we could stay here for years. Nigel, please don’t keep me here, please. If you let me go I won’t say a word, I won’t even speak. I’ll pretend I’ve lost my memory, I’ll pretend I’ve lost my voice. They can’t make me speak! Please, Nigel. I’ll do anything you want, but don’t keep me here.’

He had won. His dream of what he might achieve with her had come true. He smiled, raised his eyebrows and lightly shook his head. But he said nothing. Slowly he drew the gun out of its holster and pointed it at her, releasing the safety catch. Joyce rewarded him by shrinking, covering her face with her hands and bursting into tears. In a couple of days, he thought, he’d have her pleading with him to be nice to her, begging him to find her tasks to do for his comfort. He laughed then, remembering all the rudeness and insults he’d had to put up with from her. Without announcing his intention, he switched the light off and stretched out on the mattress beside Marty.

‘You smell like a Chink meal,’ he said. ‘Sweet and sour. Christ!’

Joyce couldn’t sleep. She lay staring at the ceiling in despair. With a curious kind of intuition, for she had never known any mad people, she sensed that Nigel was mad. Sooner or later he would kill her and no one would ever know, no one would hear the shot or care if they did, and wounded perhaps, she would lie in that room till she died. The thought of it made her cry loudly, she couldn’t help herself. She would never see her mother again or her father and her brothers, or kiss Stephen or be held in his arms. Nigel hissed at her to shut up and give them all a bit of hush, so she cried quietly until the pillow was wet with tears and, exhausted, she drifted off into dreams of home and of sitting with Stephen in the Childon Arms and talking of wedding plans.

Marty’s anguished voice woke her. It was still dark.

‘Nige,’ he said. He hardly ever used Nigel’s name or its ugly diminutive. ‘Nige, what’s happening to me? I went out to the bog and I had to crawl back on my hands and knees. I can’t hardly walk. My guts are on fire. My eyes have gone yellow.’

‘First your pee, now your eyes. D’you know what the bloody time is?’

‘I went down the bathroom, I don’t know how I made it. I looked at myself in the mirror. I’m yellow all over, my whole body’s gone yellow. I’ll have to go see the doc.’

That woke Nigel fully. He lurched out of bed, the gun hanging in its holster against his naked side. He stood over Marty and gripped his shoulders.